Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of The Enforcer by Anirudhya Mitra

It begins with a gunshot — not one fired in the pages, but the echo of a life lived on the edge of it. As I turned the first few pages of The Enforcer, I felt as though I had stepped into the heart of India’s most volatile battleground — Uttar Pradesh — where the line between justice and survival often blurs, and one man in uniform dares to walk that trembling line every single day.

Written by Anirudhya Mitra — the investigative journalist who once broke the biggest stories of our times, from the Rajiv Gandhi assassination to the Bofors scandal — this book carries the unmistakable pulse of someone who has seen history unfold not from the sidelines, but from the eye of the storm. After his debut Ninety Days: The True Story of the Hunt for Rajiv Gandhi’s Assassins, which became a national bestseller and a hit SonyLIV series, Mitra returns with another real-life thriller. But this time, the story isn’t about assassins — it’s about the man who hunts them.

The Enforcer traces the extraordinary life and career of IPS officer Prashant Kumar — the man who became the face of law enforcement in a state infamous for its crime-politics nexus. Through shootouts, terror crackdowns, and communal flashpoints, Kumar emerges not as a myth or caricature, but as a flesh-and-blood officer torn between the ideals…